Last year, Cheuk Him Ryan Sun (he/him) used his time as a CES 2024 Graduate Student Research Fellow to work on a project related to his PhD dissertation. CES is excited to announce that the research Ryan conducted during his fellowship has evolved into a research article published in the Journal of Holocaust Research! Find the link to Ryan’s article and his reflections on the project below!
“Between Viennese Childhood and Shanghai Survival: Gerda Gottfried’s Poesiealbum as a Palimpsestic Object,” Journal of Holocaust Research, https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2024.2426871
Can you tell us a little bit about your research interests and how they led to your publication/project/award? |
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| Two things led to the publication of this research article. Firstly, I’m a PhD candidate in the History department. My dissertation is tentatively titled “Shelters Interrupted: Jewish refugees’ journeys to colonial Hong Kong and Singapore (1938-1941)”. It follows the journeys of certain Jewish refugees who fled to East Asia to reveal a larger geography of imagined refuges beyond Shanghai. Specifically, it demonstrates how a few hundred German and Austrian Jewish refugees found shelters in the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore, their entanglements with British colonial society, and how their refuge in the British colonies became uncertain once the Second World War began and these Jewish refugees were transformed into German ‘enemy aliens.’ Broadly, I’m interested in transnational and global histories of mobility and empire, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and refugee studies.
Secondly, I was given the opportunity to do a five-month internship with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre a couple years ago. It was during my time at the VHEC that I was introduced to their archival holdings, including the massive Gerda Gottfried family fonds. It contained documents related to the Austrian Jewish Gottfried family and their escape from Nazi persecution and survival in Shanghai. It was amongst the folders that I saw Gerda Gottfried’s notebook, or Poesiealbum. By itself, it was just a book with short poems written by her friends (most of whom were probably around 12-years-old) and family members, or some simple drawings. However, what made me curious about it was that in some of the entries, there was the name of a city or country written towards the bottom. This curiosity firstly led me to write a short article about the notebook in the VHEC’s newsletter, before transforming these early research notes into an academic publication. |
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What are the main arguments/goals of your publication/project? |
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| The main goal of my article was to trace how an ordinary object can become imbued with a Holocaust significance by using the example of Gerda Gottfried’s Poesiealbum. It use the concept of a palimpsest to structure both the article and the Poesiealbum. And by contextualizing the notebook alongside Gerda’s life, it reveals layered histories that entangles childhood, displacement, and postwar Holocaust knowledge.
Gerda’s notebook was personally sentimental as many of the poems were written by her friends and family in Austria – including one written a few days before the Gottfried’s planned departure from Vienna. From 1939 to 1945, there are no entries; but in December 1946, two new |
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What were some of the challenges you faced in your research, and how did you overcome them? |
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| I think the biggest challenge was finding a balance between remaining faithful to the sources, and speculation. If this article relied solely on the Poesiealbum, then I’d believe it’d be rather difficult to write about it without speculating. However, it was very fortunate that not only did the VHEC house the Gottfried family fonds, but also that they interviewed Gerda three times in the late-1990s. By using both the oral histories and the textual materials, I was able to craft a narrative that didn’t speculate too far outside the bounds of the sources.
A second issue was tracing the names of the people within the Poesiealbum. Excluding family members and relatives, it was almost impossible to find information about Gerda’s childhood friends. Some names were illegible and others did not pop up when I searched relevant databases. The only childhood friend I was able to trace with reliable, if circumstantial, evidence was Martha Schustik, who was interviewed by the Shoah Foundation. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I would’ve been able to track down any of Gerda’s childhood friends. |
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Do you have plans to continue this project? What’s next for you? |
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| I don’t think so. This was very much a passion project born from my time working at the VHEC. However, the Gottfried family fonds still hold a lot of materials. I’ve looked through Gerda’s Shanghai photo albums and became fascinated with six pictures of Gerda with her cat in Shanghai. Gerda briefly mentioned her cat, as well as foster a dog in postwar Shanghai as Jewish refugees were leaving. I written a draft paper that looks into the relationship between animals and the Holocaust, particularly the affective dimensions of pet owners and migration. But I need to complete the dissertation first, haha! |